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Sunday, May 20, 2012

At long last! I managed to fully reproduce my Linux xmodmap layout on OS X.

I don't think I have particularly peculiar typing needs. I often type code, which frequently uses characters like "[", "{", and "<". Those are easy to type using the US keyboard layout. I also often type French, which frequently uses accented characters like "é", "à", and "û". In that situation, most people opt for switching between keyboard layouts depending on the situation. I, however, opted for a custom keyboard layout.

My custom keyboard layout is mostly the US keyboard layout, plus some Alt+key combinations for dead keys like "´", "`", and "^". On Linux, this was easy to setup using xmodmap. Implementing the keyboard layout on OS X was a bit more complicated, because its XML representation of keyboard layouts is very long and it's not easy to test changes incrementally, but I eventually managed to do it.

Then one day, I decided that the modifier keys were too low.

I am not even using Emacs, but typing Ctrl with my pinky is really twisting my hand in a way I don't like. So I bought an ergonomic keyboard. It didn't help.

One of the reasons I chose this particular keyboard was because of the two little extra arrow keys below the space bar. I thought I could remap them to Ctrl and Shift, thereby allowing me to type those troublesome modifiers using my thumb instead of my pinky. That didn't work either. The keyboard preferences which were installed with the keyboard helpfully allow me to remap those to any other key... except modifiers. No luck directly modifying the layout files either, not even through keyboard layout creation tools like Ukulele. I did manage to turn Caps Lock into an extra Ctrl, but the other modifiers looked like they would be stuck in place forever.

I had no such problems with Linux. Again using xmodmap, I converted the key above the enter into an extra Shift key, much to the relief of my right pinky. The only annoyance with this solution was that I kept trying to use that key as a Shift on the Mac computer too, only to be presented with a disappointing backslash character as a result.

Well, those days are now behind me! Today, I downloaded KeyRemap4MacBook, a very helpful tool which managed to accomplish what so many others had failed. I am now typing this text on my Mac, using the backslash key as a Shift! And my right pinky is very grateful.